Wikipedia Deep Dive

C. S. Lewis

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In 1918, a British shell meant for German soldiers fell short and instead struck a nineteen-year-old Oxford student fighting in the trenches of France. Two of his comrades died instantly. The wounded soldier—an angry young atheist who despised England, adored Norse mythology, and was secretly caring for his dead friend's mother—would survive to become one of the most influential Christian writers of the twentieth century. His name was Clive Staples Lewis, though he would have bristled at hearing it. Since age four, he had insisted on being called Jack.

The Boy Who Renamed Himself

The story of that name is itself a window into Lewis's character. When he was four years old, his beloved dog Jacksie was killed by a horse-drawn carriage in Belfast. The grief-stricken child responded by adopting the dog's name. He would answer to nothing else. Eventually he softened to just "Jack," and that remained his name for the rest of his life, at least among those who actually knew him.

This stubborn, imaginative streak defined young Jack from the beginning. Born in Belfast in 1898, he grew up in a house so full of books that he later wrote finding something new to read was "as easy as walking into a field and finding a new blade of grass." He and his older brother Warren—called Warnie—invented an elaborate fantasy world they named Boxen, populated by talking animals who ran their own civilization. Lewis had fallen in love with Beatrix Potter's stories, and he never quite fell out of love with the idea of animals that could think and speak.

His mother Flora was remarkable. She was the first woman to graduate with a mathematics degree from Queen's College Belfast—no small achievement in Victorian Ireland. She came from Church of Ireland clergy, including a bishop in her lineage. But she died of cancer when Jack was just nine years old, and something broke in the boy that would take decades to mend.

The Making of an Atheist

After his mother's death, Jack's father sent him to England for schooling. This might sound like a reasonable decision, but for Lewis it felt like exile. He arrived on English shores and found everything alien and hostile. "The strange English accents with which I was surrounded seemed like the voices of demons," he later wrote. He conceived what he called "a hatred for England which took many years to heal."

The schools were often worse than the country. His first, Wynyard School, was so poorly run it soon closed for lack of students. He briefly attended Campbell College near his Belfast home but left after a few months due to respiratory problems. Then came Malvern, where he found the social competition exhausting. A classmate later remembered him as "a riotously amusing atheist" who was "pretty foul mouthed about it."

Somewhere in these miserable school years, between his mother's death and his father's emotional distance, Lewis abandoned the Christianity of his childhood. He didn't just drift away—he actively rejected it. Looking back, he would describe his teenage self as paradoxically "very angry with God for not existing" and "equally angry with him for creating a world." It's a peculiar kind of atheism that stays so furious with the deity it denies.

But if Lewis lost his faith in God, he found something else to believe in: the literature and mythology of the ancient North.

The Call of the North

Lewis discovered Norse mythology as a teenager, and it overwhelmed him. The Icelandic sagas, with their tales of gods and heroes facing inevitable doom with unflinching courage, awakened something he would spend his whole life trying to name. He called it "Northernness," and later, more simply, "joy."

This wasn't happiness, exactly. It was longing—an intense desire for something just beyond reach. The beauty of nature could trigger it. So could certain music, certain passages of poetry, certain moments when the light fell just so through the trees. Lewis believed this longing pointed toward something real, though at the time he couldn't have said what.

He threw himself into northern literature with the passionate intensity he brought to everything. He wrote epic poetry. He sketched out an opera based on Norse myths. His private tutor, William Kirkpatrick—whom Lewis affectionately nicknamed "The Great Knock"—sharpened his reasoning skills until they were razor-keen while feeding his love of Greek literature and mythology.

The Irish connection mattered too. Lewis discovered the poetry of William Butler Yeats and felt an immediate kinship. "I have here discovered an author exactly after my own heart," he wrote to a friend, praising Yeats's use of Ireland's Celtic heritage. When Lewis later met Yeats twice in Oxford, he was astonished to find his English classmates completely indifferent to the Celtic Revival movement. "I am often surprised to find how utterly ignored Yeats is among the men I have met," he observed. "Perhaps his appeal is purely Irish—if so, then thank the gods that I am Irish."

This Irish identity stayed with Lewis all his life. He regularly returned to Northern Ireland, spent his honeymoon there, and never quite lost a certain affectionate contempt for the English. Describing an encounter with a fellow Irishman in England, he wrote: "Like all Irish people who meet in England, we ended by criticisms on the invincible flippancy and dullness of the Anglo-Saxon race."

War and Its Wounds

In 1916, Lewis won a scholarship to Oxford's University College. He was seventeen, brilliant, and deeply learned in languages living and dead. Within months, he had enlisted in the British Army.

This was the First World War, and the Western Front was a mechanized slaughterhouse. Lewis arrived at the Somme Valley on his nineteenth birthday—November 29, 1917—and got his first taste of trench warfare. The mud. The shells. The constant presence of death. He was there for the German spring offensive of 1918, when the enemy made a desperate push to break through before American reinforcements could arrive.

On April 15, 1918, during an assault on the village of Riez du Vinage, that British shell fell short. Lewis took shrapnel wounds. Two men beside him died. It was the kind of random, meaningless violence that confirmed everything he believed about a godless universe.

During his convalescence, depressed and homesick, Lewis received no visits from his father. This absence deepened an already painful estrangement. But there was one person who did visit, who wrote letters, who cared for him: Janie Moore, the mother of his friend Paddy.

The Unusual Mrs. Moore

Here is one of the strangest chapters in Lewis's life, and biographers have been arguing about it for decades.

During army training, Lewis had roomed with a fellow cadet named Paddy Moore. They made each other a promise: if either died in the war, the survivor would look after the other's family. Paddy died in action in 1918. Lewis kept his promise.

But "keeping the promise" doesn't quite capture what happened next. Lewis essentially adopted Paddy's mother. Janie Moore was twenty-six years older than Lewis—she was forty-five when they met, he was eighteen—but they formed an intense bond that would last until her death. Lewis introduced her as his mother. He referred to her that way in letters. When he bought a house in 1930, she and her daughter Maureen moved in with him and his brother Warnie.

Were they lovers? The question has fascinated and troubled biographers. One scholar who knew Lewis for twenty-nine years initially thought the odds were "fifty-fifty," then later changed his mind and concluded they almost certainly were. Others remain skeptical. The evidence is circumstantial: their unusual closeness, the arrangement of bedrooms at their shared home, the intensity of Lewis's attachment to a woman old enough to be his mother.

What's not in dispute is that Lewis cared for Janie Moore for the rest of her life. When dementia overtook her in her later years and she had to be moved to a nursing home, Lewis visited her every single day until she died in 1951. Whatever their relationship had been, his devotion was absolute.

Lewis himself offered this assessment of her: "She was generous and taught me to be generous, too."

The Reluctant Convert

After the war, Lewis returned to Oxford and proceeded to excel at everything. He took Firsts—the highest honors—in three separate subjects: Greek and Latin literature in 1920, Philosophy and Ancient History in 1922, and English in 1923. By 1925, at age twenty-six, he had been elected a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford. He would remain there for twenty-nine years.

He was also still an atheist. A brilliant, well-read, argumentative atheist who knew more about the history of Christianity than most believers. But something was shifting.

The shift had to do with friends. At Oxford, Lewis fell in with a group of intellectuals who shared his love of mythology, literature, and long, winding conversations. One of them was a quiet Catholic philologist named J.R.R. Tolkien, who was working on an elaborate mythology of his own—a project that would eventually become The Lord of the Rings.

Lewis and Tolkien became close friends. They met regularly, along with other writers and scholars, in an informal group that came to be called the Inklings. They read their works-in-progress aloud to each other. They argued about everything. And Tolkien, along with another friend named Hugo Dyson, slowly wore down Lewis's objections to Christianity.

The crucial conversation happened during a late-night walk in September 1931. Tolkien and Dyson argued that myths—the Norse myths Lewis loved, the Greek myths, all the stories of dying and rising gods—were not just beautiful lies. They were echoes of a true myth, the story that actually happened in history when God became man and died and rose again. The myths were the dream, Tolkien said. The Gospels were the thing itself.

Something clicked. Twelve days later, while riding to the zoo in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, Lewis found that he had arrived as a believer. "When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God," he later wrote, "and when we reached the zoo I did."

He was thirty-two years old.

The Mere Christian

Lewis's Christianity had a peculiar quality: he refused to take sides.

Growing up in Belfast, he had watched Catholics and Protestants define themselves primarily by what they opposed. The sectarian divisions of Northern Ireland seemed to him a grotesque distortion of what faith should be. So when he became a Christian, he became what he called "an ordinary layman of the Church of England"—and he insisted on staying ordinary.

He wouldn't debate the finer points of doctrine that divided denominations. He wouldn't champion Anglicanism over Catholicism or Presbyterianism. Instead, he focused on what he called "mere Christianity"—the core beliefs that all Christians shared, stripped of the tribal loyalties that turned faith into faction.

This approach would make Lewis unusually influential. Protestants could read him without feeling lectured by a Catholic. Catholics could read him without feeling attacked by a Protestant. He spoke to the common ground, and he found that the common ground was vast.

When World War Two began, the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC) invited Lewis to give a series of radio talks about Christianity. These broadcasts, delivered in Lewis's clear, warm, unpretentious voice, reached millions of listeners. He explained the faith as though he were chatting with a friend who had sincere questions—because that's essentially what he was doing. He drew on all his skills as a teacher and all his experience as a former skeptic to anticipate objections and answer them fairly.

The talks were later collected into the book Mere Christianity, which remains one of the most widely read works of Christian apologetics—the defense and explanation of faith—ever written.

The Wardrobe and the Wartime

Meanwhile, Lewis had been writing fiction.

The Screwtape Letters, published in 1942, took the form of correspondence from a senior devil to a junior one, offering advice on how to damn a human soul. It was clever, funny, and devastatingly insightful about the small temptations and self-deceptions that lead people astray. The book made Lewis famous.

But his most enduring creation came after the war. During the Blitz, London children had been evacuated to the countryside for safety, and some had stayed at the house Lewis shared with his brother and Mrs. Moore. Lewis wondered what it would be like for children suddenly transported to a strange house, opening doors they'd never opened before.

That wondering became The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950. Four children discover that an old wardrobe in a country house is actually a doorway to another world—a frozen land called Narnia, ruled by an evil witch, where a great lion named Aslan represents something very like Christ.

Lewis wrote six more Narnia books over the next six years. They became beloved by children and adults alike, selling hundreds of millions of copies, getting translated into dozens of languages, and eventually being adapted for stage, television, and film. The boy who invented Boxen with his brother, who fell in love with talking animals in Beatrix Potter's stories, had created a world that would outlive him by generations.

Joy and Grief

For most of his adult life, Lewis was a confirmed bachelor—or at least, that's how it appeared from the outside. His relationship with Mrs. Moore was invisible to the public. His domestic life consisted of his brother Warnie (who struggled with alcoholism), his academic work, his Inklings gatherings, and his enormous correspondence with readers who had been moved by his books.

Then, in the mid-1950s, a fan letter arrived that would change everything.

Joy Davidman was an American poet and writer who had converted from atheism to Christianity in part because of reading Lewis's books. She was brilliant, combative, divorced with two sons, and completely unintimidated by Lewis's fame. When they met in person, she challenged him intellectually in a way few people ever had. Lewis was captivated.

They married in 1956. Lewis was fifty-seven. Joy was forty-one. It began as a marriage of convenience—she needed British residency to stay in England—but it became a genuine love match. Lewis, the lifelong bachelor who had written so much about spiritual love, discovered romantic love for the first time.

It lasted four years.

Joy had cancer. It went into remission, rallied, and then returned. She died in 1960, at age forty-five. Lewis, shattered by grief, wrote a short, raw book called A Grief Observed that documents his wrestling with loss, doubt, and the God he had spent decades defending. It remains one of the most honest accounts of bereavement ever written.

The End and After

Lewis himself died on November 22, 1963, of kidney failure. He was sixty-four years old. His death was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on the same day—the news from Dallas dominated the world's attention, and Lewis's passing went largely unnoticed at the time.

But his work endured. The Narnia books continued to sell millions. His theological writings—Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, The Great Divorce—remained in print and continued to influence readers across every Christian denomination. His scholarly work on medieval and Renaissance literature remained required reading in English departments.

Fifty years after his death, in 2013, Lewis was finally honored with a memorial in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey—the section of the ancient church reserved for Britain's greatest writers. He lies in distinguished company there: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen.

The angry atheist from Belfast, the wounded soldier, the devoted son to a woman not his mother, the reluctant convert, the bachelor who found love at fifty-seven only to lose it at sixty-one—all of these C.S. Lewises have faded into history. What remains is the work: the imagined world behind the wardrobe, the devil's correspondence course in temptation, the radio talks that made Christianity make sense to millions.

And perhaps, somewhere, a longing for something just beyond reach that Lewis spent his whole life chasing and calling by its true name: joy.